ACM Distinguished Paper award to quantum software researcher

Quantum software researcher, Dr Nengkun Yu, is the recipient of a Distinguished Paper award at this year’s ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2021).

Co-authored with Professor Jens Palsberg (UCLA), their paper "Quantum Abstract Interpretation" describes a new tool to check for key ‘correctness criteria’ in quantum programs.

In quantum programming, assertions allow programmers to decide if a quantum program type of state matches its expected value (in a classical, superposition or entangled state) at particular steps in the algorithm.

“Our abstract interpretation tool can automatically verify assertions in polynomial time,” said Dr Yu, who is based at the Centre for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney.

Quantum computer simulations require huge amounts of storage using a supercomputer, but these powerful computers can only simulate quantum circuits of up to 50 qubits.

Dr Yu is encouraged by their results.

“Our approach scales to programs with 300 qubits, which goes way beyond the 50 qubit limit of a supercomputer,” he said.

“The abstract interpretation tool can check assertions in BV, GHZ and Grover, the three families of benchmark programs,”

“We have done experiments with additional programs and are yet to find a case where our implementation was unable to verify the specified assertion,”

The team’s promising results have paved the way for future work in quantum programming.

PLDI is a premier international forum in the field of programming languages and programming systems research, covering the areas of design, implementation, theory, applications, and performance. Scheduled events for PLDI 2021 will commence on June 20.